Enjoy a bit of fan-service on my behalf

Writing this opening sentence marks my beating the next generation installment of Prince of Persia for the Xbox 360 (or PS3 depending on one's predilections) as of two minutes ago. Legitimately the credits are rolling. And I am most displeased. Turns out, Prince of Persia, POP for short, was little else than that. Pop for the video game generation.

Now "pop" exists everywhere. Notably there is pop art, which was a microcosm unto itself; pop art had a certain self-reflexive genius that kept it from being serviceable to the masses on a delicious silver tray. Not everyone will get pop art per se.

More notorious is pop music, which supposedly everyone "gets." In fact, if not enough people get it, than the contemporary music industry will have done wrong. I love Lady Gaga as much as the next person. She's actually quite talented, particularly in an acoustic performance where it's just her voice and a piano. But natural instruments aren't going to sell records nowadays. If Lady Gaga wants us snatching sequins from her tray, she's going to paint it with sex, heavy bass, buzzes, and whirs. Pop music can't exist without an image to back it up. We couldn't possibly let our imaginations run free, that would be too taxing on our gullible brains after all.


Where once music created an image, an image must reign supreme

So I present to you pop video games. And I'm not only referring to games inspired by Miley Cyrus' alter-ego, who by the way, is also a great perpetuator of music that sells (which, if not paid for in money, is paid for in copious increments of bandwidth from illegal download after download). Even a game like Prince of Persia is guilty of "popness." Games that have the talent to boot, but come up short.

I should preface this by mentioning that the Sands of Time trilogy is one of my favorites to date, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and The Two Thrones standing out among them. This new installment, aptly, unoriginally, and confusing titled Prince of Persia, is remarkably different and dangerously similar in other areas. So I'll just refer to it as POP from here on out. A major factor (of many) that diminished Warrior Within for me was one that POP capitalized on. A faux notion of open-endedness - a striking concoction actually, that both Warrior Within and POP attempted, generating a hybrid system of open-ended linearity. Though Warrior Within really only had two branching paths that merged later on, POP is a bunch of intersecting straight lines that can be conveniently traveled in either direction. Oh, look at these coincidentally positioned slanted ramps (there must be a thousand of these "slides" in POP...ugh)! I am sure glad that even in the wake of an awakening evil god that never shows his face, there is still another set of slides right beside me to take me back if I later desired. It's time we all admitted it, gamers. An absence of linearity does not always make it a better game. Stop complaining about it and developers won't think it's "popular" anymore and screw potentially great games up!


Press A, then B, then A again...watch the Prince do all the work

Because the world can be conquered virtually in any order you like, there is no real growth in the game, other than "power plates" that assist you in traveling from point A to point B - a hyper jump of sorts in most cases that, rather than functioning as a sign of the prince's strength, is more akin to opening doors that can only be blasted with missiles. Soon, it becomes all too annoyingly clear that POP is a lot of the same platforming elements that manage to come together in excess in a beautiful world.

This game has style to be sure, ignoring the prince's inexplicably defined body. As if video games don't have enough barrel-chested, abdominal muscle doting alpha male heroes - on top of it, he is a doofus with pretty much only a donkey, women, and taking a bath on his mind. Why he is even in the desert to begin with and agrees to help Elika is initially only supported by a painfully normative trope: the masculine hunting the feminine. And because the game has no specific direction, the plot and writing becomes evasive and circular; clever in that even the story is uninhibited by the player's "non-linear" choices, but without real forward progression and little to no pay off by the end. There are two big plot twists in the last five minutes, which come at a time when the player could care less about them - the first is obvious and key to finishing off the big bad baddy for good, and the second totally undoes all your frustrating work.

And POP is supremely frustrating. The Sands of Time trilogy never had particularly difficult controls, but POP really strives for the overly simplified. Unfortunately, the less buttons you have to press ultimately, the less direct control you have over the prince. Now with less buttons, the player doesn't actually feel like he's performing all these wondrous and gravity-defying acrobatics - which the inclusion of in the previous trilogy helped to excite the player. What it boils down to, is a genre deconstruction. If that was POP's goal, than power to the developers (but I sincerely doubt it).

Now when did my beloved Prince of Persia series become a pure platformer? In fact, POP relies on its platforms. Elika's save states are dependent on the last platform the player stood on. Worse, when did this series become a rhythmic-platforming-button-masher? With little control over the prince, long acrobatic sequences become rhythm games in disguise. A walkthrough of the game could boil down to a sequence of button inputs in some cases. A wall run, then grabbing a ring, continue wall running again, jumping to the next wall to find a another ring, completing a wall run with a final jump sounds complicated...except it's only knowing when to push A, B, A, B, A (and here, as in many other instances, touching the control stick is barely required). In most cases, the limit of a wall run puts these sequences on a beat and you feel like a toddler with unusually good rhythm conducting a surprisingly pretty symphony. Each set piece in POP is indeed, a disguised button prompt in a rhythm game.


I WILL SMASH YOU WITH MY INCESSANT QTES

I will forever love Resident Evil 4...but I will never forgive the game for popularizing QTEs. Thankfully, they may be on the fade now, but few games abuse this over-exposed device like POP. It's like how Lady Gaga and Beyonce were each churning out hit after hit and actually thought "Videophone" was either a good video, good song, or good idea (hint: I think "Videophone" is none of these). In video games, QTEs are often too much of a good thing. In POP they are never a good thing. What's especially strange is that it seems the game punishes the player for being smart and blocking attacks. Perhaps if a player is blocking into infinity, an enemy's interruption is understandable, but the chance of every exchange of blows involving a quick time event in POP is highly conceivable. Even worse, is that each boss character has four or so specific QTEs that they can throw in succession. Even even worse is that the probability of these bosses doing all four QTEs in a row is very high. The process is trivializing and boring. It is even even even stupid. These QTEs are not so much difficult, as they are intrusive, seeing as a player will have performed any of these at least a dozen times in the five or so times they fight any given boss (the repetition in POP is at a franchise high here).

Far too frequent QTEs are just one way in which POP wants to deliberately force the player into messing up. Let's not forget those damned plates. I cannot begin to fathom how many times I needed a good ol' Elika saving because the lighting was too dark for me to see in a corrupted location. Or how many times I guessed incorrectly which way to dodge in any of the campy Wings of Ormazd flight simulators (who the eff is Ormazd anyway? perhaps we'll never know...perhaps I'll find out in the epilogue, but I'm not crossing any fingers). Because the game cannot develop itself beyond a pre-determined "non-linear" structure, POP instead trickles in little extra obstacles that really only make the game more annoying and frustrating.

Frankly, with such repetition and button mashing, Ubisoft may have benefited financially if they created an off-beat answer to Rockband with a rhythm game. Perhaps the could call it "PersiaBand." While the player presses the buttons they're supposed to, the prince and Elika flit about like little nymphs. Except there is little music in POP to speak of...so maybe that answer is "no" as well...

And yet I cannot bring myself to hate this game. I quite enjoyed it in fact, but it also irks me to no end. I don't think it's a very good game, but enjoyable in its own right. Much like any song I'll dance to at a party. Or like any hip hop hit, which has often far too many verses for its own good. Pop is usually overstaying its welcome.

And such is the sad state of pop. So much potential to really be something great. POP had a lot to live up to, and the pedigree was certainly there. Unfortunately it wasn't much of a comeback album. When pop is the trend, what existed before any year's current "pop" is going to have a seriously difficult time sneaking back in. And in many cases, assimilating to the "pop" fails. It all becomes lackluster fan service. Products that want to reel the masses in with a catchy beat, or as pop proves today, a powerful image to boot. POP has the look for the most part, but its heart is running on clockwork.

-BGB